I was on vacation to the US last week, and a few technology-related things stood out to me. One, the in-flight entertainment things aboard international Delta flights are absolutely terrible. Worst software I've ever used, and many of them were plain broken. iPads/Android tablets please, Delta. Second, there were more employees than customers in the Las Vegas Apple Store. Since there were a reasonable amount of customers, there were even more employees. It looked ridiculous. Are they all like that? Three, using a Windows Phone 8 device to mooch off an Apple Store's wifi is strangely satisfying. Four, there are a lot of technology commercials on US TV, and they are all corny as hell. Two iPads playing piano? Children holding a PowerPoint presentation to convince their parents to switch mobile plans? Seriously? Is this what this industry has come to? Five, it's pretty clear iPads and iPhones are way, way, way more popular in the US than in The Netherlands. You see them everywhere, and people display them so openly. It was jarring. In The Netherlands, I always feel as if people are ashamed to take devices out of their pockets in the first place. No wonder US-based writers like Gruber and Arment think Apple dominates everything - if you rarely leave the US, it seems as if they do! Six, and this is not technology related at all but I want to get it off my chest because us Europeans could learn a thing or two from it: Americans are the nicest people I've ever had the pleasure of dealing with. I knew this from my existing American friends and from my previous trip to the US (Texas, ten years ago), but it bears repeating. Open, interested, kind, helpful, considerate, and nice. Not exactly qualities I'd ascribe to most of my fellow countrymen. Alright, as you were!

I have family there. It can be infuriating that people don't open up, especially when you do know they can speak English but this is more to do with potential personal shame if their language skills turn out to be actually inadequate than anything to do with racism or ethnic pride (though of course I have experienced that elsewhere - yes, I am looking at you, Paris).

In my experience, SK and South Koreans have changed *a lot* in the last decade and a half. When I first went, handicapped people would be begging in tube trains and in subways, and they were overall simply ostracised. Now you see families with their disabled relatives doing everyday stuff, and nobody blinks. I am not saying that people don't still beg and that the rest of the country is like Seoul: they do, and it isn't, but if you think that at the same time here in England hate crime against disabled people has increased over recent years, it makes you think.

The key to a lot of this is drinking, much like in England: share a bottle, and you share views and cultures. Koreans are indeed very, very proud people. They have been hemmed in for millennia by other, much larger, and much more territorially aggressive nations, and have survived. That takes a certain stoicism and nerve. But not the kind of racism that the OP portrays.

That is because of the cultural shift. In Paris, being nice, polite and friendly is not something to be proud of. We mock the british and anglo-saxons in general for being polite. In Paris, you have to shout. When someone asks something, you just ignore him or you shout at him. When tourists ask for a direction, you send them the other way. Parisians are proud of their snobism and general lack or manners. It's part of the romance of Paris.